OK, I’m coming to this party very late but I can’t let this go. Some reality-challenged editor at the New Statesman published this rubbish about global warming having stopped in 1998, which, as usual, lots of people leapt upon in their desperation to avoid facing the truth.

Personally, I didn’t have to look beyond the byline to know the article isn’t worthy of anything other than scorn. The author was apparently known among his erstwhile colleagues at the BBC as David Shitehouse for his habit of writing seemingly great scoops that turn out to be utter rubbish, or very old news rehashed, or both. (The other British science journalist whose work also deserves instant dismissal is Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times. If he writes it, you can be confident it ain’t true.)

The reality is that the long-term temperature trend is very much on the up, despite the fact that we’re at the low point of the 11-year solar cycle, which means we’re receiving less heat from the Sun than usual. See here, here or here.

Curious timing, isn’t it. On the weekend, Dolly creator Ian Wilmut announces he is abandoning cloning for reprogramming to create embryonic stem cells. On Tuesday, two teams announce that they have created ESC-like cells from human skin cells by adding various combinations of genes.

So was Telegraph journalist Roger Highfield trying to beat the competition by running a related story? Or was Ian Wilmut attempting to steal his colleagues’ thunder ahead of the real event? (It worked. British TV news covered the Wilmut story but devoted little time to the latest news.)

I have to say that the thing that makes me least excited about the new method of creating ESC-like cells is that Wilmut is turning his attention to it. There are some brilliant scientists who never get lucky. There are some very poor scientists who get very lucky. I have no doubt which category Wilmut falls in.

Personalities (or the lack thereof) aside, I’m still can’t get very excited about a technique that generates cells that turn into teratomas when injected into mice. (Teratomas are very nasty cancers containing a mixture of cell types, sometimes even teeth.)

Regardless of whether you get them from cloning or reprogramming, cells with ESC properties are potentially very dangerous. My view is that the only way to make them safe will be to engineer a suicide gene that can be triggered, say, by a certain antibiotic. Having to trigger the switch will, of course, be a major bummer if you spent years recuperating from a stroke thanks to stem cells injected into the brain, only for them all to have to be destroyed. Still, it’s a risk worth taking.

The really interesting question is who will get the chance to take it. The success rate of the reprogramming techniques is pretty low and even if it can be dramatically improved, and made safe, it’s not going to become cheap anytime soon. Even in the unlikely event that any treatments based on this hit the clinic within a decade or so, it is likely to remain a (very) rich person’s treatment for some decades to come. That is, after it has been tested on poor people, of course. That will pose serious issues for public health systems like the UK’s.